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Europe’s Rift on Overfishing and Subsidies

Government inspectors, left, check out a fishing vessel off the Spanish port of Cádiz.Credit Laura Leon for The International Herald Tribune

Two weeks ago, the European Parliament voted overwhelmingly to require that the 27-nation bloc’s fisheries be managed on a sustainable basis within a few years.

That vote, the first step toward overhauling Europe’s Common Fisheries Policy, was hailed by conservationists as a major victory. It was made possible by the Lisbon Treaty, an agreement that put the Parliament on an equal footing with the European Fisheries Council – a body made up of ministers from member nations – in setting policy.

This week the Parliament began to debate the second half of the so-called Common Fisheries Policy reform, addressing the thorny question of how to ensure that the subsidies that Europe pays out to the fishing industry don’t wind up encouraging the same practices that it wants to end.
One thing quickly became clear: despite the margin of victory – 502 to 137 — in the previous vote, victory for the pro-conservation camp is far from guaranteed in a decision on a proposed European Maritime and Fisheries Fund.

“We won a huge victory for sustainability two weeks ago with a huge majority,” Isabella Lovin, a Green party legislator from Sweden and a longtime critic of European fisheries subsidies, said by telephone. “You would expect the subsidies vote to go the same way. But I’m not sure we’ll have such a big victory when it comes to money.”

“My worry is that there is an unholy alliance of between the conservatives and the left,” she added, “one that wants to continue giving subsidies.”

The fight to change the basic rules two weeks ago was led by Ulrike Rodust, a German Socialist who served as the rapporteur, or parliamentary leader, with responsibility for representing Parliament in final negotiations with fisheries ministers in Brussels. On Monday, Ms. Rodust articulated the position of many subsidy foes when she said there that no money should be provided to build new boats when there was already an excess of capacity.

While Ms. Rodust is firmly in the conservationist camp, the rapporteur on subsidies is Alain Cadec, a Frenchman from Brittany who opposed the fisheries regulation vote on the ground that it was “dogmatic and populist.”

Mr. Cadec, a member of the Union for a Popular Movement, the party of the former president Nicolas Sarkozy, said in a telephone interview on Tuesday that he was seeking “a major evolution” in the way that Europe aids the fishing industry but that he did not want to end subsidies, especially for for building new boats. “The average age of the European fleet is 27 years,’ he said.

Fishermen should get funds to build new vessels, he added, but with controls to “ensure that fishing capacity isn’t augmented.”

“My objective is to have a sustainable fishery and maintain the European model of fishing,” Mr. Cadec said. “It’s an important activity, socially and economically.”

The bloc’s fisheries policy has long been the target of wrath for conservationists and taxpayer advocates. In the conservationists’ case, it is because the policy has contributed to a system in which 68 percent of European fish stocks are overexploited, according to the Parliament’s Fisheries Committee. From the taxpayer advocates’ view, it is simply economically inefficient.

Fishing is a hard, dangerous and uncertain business, and subsidies can make the difference between success or failure for the operators, not to mention the communities that depend on them. But that is another way of saying that the money keeps unprofitable boats going out after fewer fish.

The European Court of Auditors, an independent agency that monitors European Union spending, found in a 2011 study that the subsidy policy was so poorly planned that from 1992 to 2008, despite an official policy of reducing the fleet to match capacity with shrinking stocks, capacity actually rose by about 14 percent.

Bloom Association, a French nongovermental organization, said last week that it had examined the finances of France’s largest fishing company, Scapêche, for the period from 2004 to 2011 and had learned that the company had 19 million euros, or $25 million, of recurring losses in those years, despite receiving about 10 million euros of subsidies and millions of euros in debt relief and other aid from its parent.

Scapêche, a unit of the Intermarché supermarket group, did not reply to requests for comment.

But in a statement carried by Le Marin, a French magazine, Intermarché contested that characterization, saying that Scapêche “has had positive results since 2009.” Aid given to European fishing “aims at improving the sector” with best fishing practices, best product quality and safety for fishermen, and all such aid “is accorded in complete transparency,” it said.

A 2011 report from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists found that Spanish boats alone had received more than 5.8 billion euros, or $7.7 billion, in subsidies over the previous decade – nearly one-third of the industry’s total value.

“Simply put, nearly one in three fish caught on a Spanish hook or raised in a Spanish farm is paid for with public money,” the authors said.

But in many cases, she said, the goal was defeated as they used the money to buy new boats, meaning the payout “was a hidden investment aid in many cases.”

The money doesn’t all come from the European Union kitty. Oceana, a conservation group, reckons that European fishermen also get about 1.4 billion euros a year ($1.86 billion) in fuel tax subsidies from their home country taxpayers.

Still, when push comes to shove, fishermen, like farmers, hold significant political power, and pork-barrel politics creates a sort of inertia. Members of the European Parliament have added 2,800 amendments to the body’s subsidies proposal, and Mr. Cadec will have his hands full whittling those down to a manageable number in the next few weeks in preparation for an April vote.

Subsidies are necessary “to allow fishers to live in dignity,” Maria do Céu Patrão Neves, a European People’s Party legislator from Portugal, said in Parliament.

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